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"Midnight Mirrors are horrifying prisons wherein it slowly drives you mad. There's one on the moon, if you can believe it."

DC 10: Midnight mirrors are magical prisons used by church of Shaydis to punish those who offend the church and its god. Each is an extraplanar prison within a mirror in which the prisoners never age and are trapped for an eternity of torment.

DC 15: The midnight mirror in the Boroi family’s possession was broken centuries ago, and now functions differently than normal. The command word to retrieve a prisoner from the plane no longer works, and the mirror leaks shadow essence from the Plane of Shadow into the Material Plane.

DC 20: Unlike a normal midnight mirror, the broken specimen in the basement of Boroi Manor allows two willing subjects on opposite sides of the mirror to trade bodies (as the magic jar spell) by simultaneously touching the mirror’s surface. Such a switch lasts indefinitely, or until the two subjects switch souls again through the same process.

DC 25: The only way to destroy the midnight mirror is to enter it and kill the physical manifestation of the magic item’s consciousness with a shard of itself from the Material Plane. Doing so will cause the prison plane to break apart and disgorge all living creatures and items originally from the Material Plane through the shattered mirror back to their plane of origin.

Stepan eagerly sends the PCs through the mirror once they know how the magic item works and how to destroy it. The baron gives them a shard of the cracked mirror which functions as an improvised light weapon dealing 1d4 damage. When used against the Heart, the shard instead functions as a +1 bane dagger, and the wielder takes no penalties for using an improvised weapon.

In the Midnight Mirror

Within the midnight mirror exists an extraplanar prison created by the ancient church of Shaydis to torment any creature held in its grasp. Nicasor’s prison took on the shape of a dark, twisted manor house. Indeed, just as the Plane of Shadow distortedly mirrors the Material Plane, the manor seems to be an off-kilter reflection of Boroi Manor—the very household Nicasor lived in for decades while serving Karpad’s ruling family. While the mirror has been successful in its task of driving Nicasor mad, the shae has nevertheless come to call the prison home, and he has named his weird manor the House of Night. Though he yearns to find an escape from his extraplanar exile, he relishes the opportunity to rule his realm with a sadism and tyranny befitting a servant of the Midnight Lord, and his power and will have grown enough that the mirror leaves him and those most loyal to him in relative peace.

Inside the House of Night, it is dark and very cold. There is no color here, and the windows are reflective, not transparent, so there is no way to see outside—indeed, within the midnight mirror, there is no outside. The manor’s walls (made of an unidentifiable black woodlike substance) are blurry and slowly undulate as if the house itself were breathing. This is not far from the truth—the malign intelligence that controls the realm within the midnight mirror fractured when the mirror broke millennia ago, and now infuses the very essence of the realm it controls, treating the House of Night as its twisted umbral body, manifesting at the center of the manor.

Over the centuries, the Heart has grown capricious and wild, its moods exacerbated by the perpetual leaking of its shadow essence into the Material Plane. But so entwined is the Heart to the midnight mirror that one can only escape the confines of the prison by killing the Heart with a piece of itself—a shattered fragment of the midnight mirror as it exists on the Material Plane. The Heart exists in a walled-in courtyard on the House of Night’s first floor; reaching it requires breaking down a wall. All walls adjacent to this isolated chamber bleed a dark, viscous ichor like the walls of a sick internal organ. Unlike other walls in the realm, however, a broken wall to G12 heals any rifts in itself, as though made of living tissue, in 1d4 hours.

The extraplanar prison within the midnight mirror was originally part of the Shadow Plane, and it retains the same planar traits (except, of course, that as a small demiplane it has a finite shape). It is only a few degrees above freezing in the House of Night, and it is also pitch black, too dark for low-light vision to function. The substance of the house’s walls and furniture is not flammable, and has a moist, mealy texture to it when examined closely. It has a hardness of 7 and 13 hit points per inch of thickness; most walls are 8 inches thick. The outer walls are infinitely thick, as they demarcate the edges of the demiplane and can thus not be breached. All of the doors in the House of Night are made of the same shadowstuff that makes up the rest of the manor, but possess the statistics of strong wooden doors for the purposes of Break DCs, hit points, and hardness. Once they are ready, Stepan sends the PCs through the midnight mirror by uttering a command word while they stand near it. While within the midnight mirror, characters do not need to eat or drink, and although time flows normally, living creatures stop aging once they reach maturity.

MIDNIGHT MIRROR PLANAR TRAITS

Though an independent demiplane, the midnight mirror has many of the same planar traits as the Shadow Plane after which it was modeled.

Dampened Light: Within the midnight mirror, all sources of light—both magical and mundane—have their ranges halved.

Enhanced Magic: Spells with the shadow descriptor or of the shadow subschool are enhanced in the midnight mirror, functioning as if their caster levels were 2 higher than normal, and specific spells become even more powerful. Shadow conjuration and shadow evocation are 30% as powerful as the conjurations and evocations they mimic (as opposed to 20%). Greater shadow conjuration and greater shadow evocation are 70% as powerful (not 60%), and a shades spell conjures at 90% of the original (not 80%). Despite the dark nature of the midnight mirror, spells that produce, use, or manipulate darkness are unaffected by the plane.

Impeded Magic: Spells with the light descriptor or that use or generate light or fire are impeded within the midnight mirror, requiring a concentration check (DC 20 + the level of the spell) in order to function normally. If the check fails, the spell does not function but is still lost as a prepared spell or spell slot.

Locked Plane: As the midnight mirror is a prison plane meant to hold souls indefinitely, planar travel to or from the midnight mirror is restricted. Creatures may only enter or leave the plane via the mirror’s user uttering the designated command word. In the case of the midnight mirror in Boroi Manor, the ability to remove a creature from the mirror in this way has been broken. Instead, a willing creature on each side of the mirror can switch bodies. Alternatively, all living creatures in the midnight mirror are ejected from the plane if the Heart is killed.